Devyn Aiken grew up feeling bad about her nose. She was often bullied when she was a kid.
When she was 14 years old, she already knew she wanted to get a nose job. As soon as she turned 18, she had her first meeting with a doctor and started saving money for the surgery.
After spending $11,000 on the nose surgery, 30-year-old Aiken has been sharing her experience on social media. She shows how the nose job has really changed her life.
Editor’s Note: Be careful. This article has some graphic pictures that might make some people uncomfortable.
Before last November, Devyn Aiken didn’t think she was ugly. Many of her 61,500 TikTok followers might think otherwise, but the truth is, she didn’t really need the surgery to feel confident. It’s actually not that complicated.
“I thought I was a pretty girl. I didn’t feel ugly. You can ask anyone. They’d say I was very confident and happy with myself,” she told PEOPLE just nine weeks after the surgery. “I just really hated my big nose.”
Since getting the nose job, Aiken, who is 30, has been posting videos on TikTok. She talks about the surgery, shows how she recovered, and compares how her face looked before and after. You could say she’s become a plastic surgery influencer. Her comment sections are full of nice comments, questions from people who might want a nose job, and also some people who don’t like her decision.
“I started documenting it from the very first day. I even posted a video when I was still in bed recovering,” Aiken said, thinking about how she became popular on the internet. “I just thought, ‘This might help other people.’ I wanted to show everything about this journey.” Aiken has put up a lot of “before” photos from the first 30 years of her life. Before last year, when triple board-certified plastic surgeon and ENT Dr. Mark Ginsburg did her nose surgery, she also shared normal day-to-day content with her pre-surgery nose.
“I kept all my videos and photos. I’m not hiding the fact that I got a nose job,” she said. “I’m not going to pretend I was someone else before. And I like posting the before and after pictures because the difference is so big.”
Aiken, who works as a paralegal in Philadelphia, doesn’t feel like she has to hide that she got a cosmetic surgery. She said this decision took 29 years to make. She’s disliked her nose her whole life, especially since it got noticeably bigger when she was a pre-teen and a young teen.
“I was bullied a lot, especially in middle school, mostly by boys,” she said. “They called me mean names like bird, Toucan Sam, really mean things. I thought, ‘If I change my nose, what else will they have to make fun of? ‘” Even when she grew up and wasn’t around those mean comments from middle school anymore, Aiken noticed that her nose always got a lot of attention.
Sometimes, when she was out shopping, she felt people staring at her. Other times, she overheard people talking about her nose.
“The earliest I remember wanting a nose job was when I was 14. I asked my mom if I could have one,” she recalled. But she knew that most doctors wouldn’t operate on a face that wasn’t fully grown.
When she turned 18, Aiken went to her first consultation by herself. But she didn’t have enough money for the surgery then. “I had a deviated septum, but it wasn’t bad enough that I had to get the surgery. It was just for looks. Insurance didn’t cover it. It was all about vanity,” she told PEOPLE.
It took her years to save up the $11,000 for the surgery. While she was saving, she learned a lot about nose jobs and knew exactly what she wanted. She went to consultations in different states like New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. She decided to have an ENT doctor do the surgery to avoid common problems like empty nose syndrome. “I wanted to make sure I could still breathe after the surgery,” Aiken said.
Dr. Ginsburg is good at making the results look natural. That’s why Aiken chose him. “I didn’t want to look like a different person. Some people get really small Barbie-like noses, but that wouldn’t suit my face,” she said. “I wanted something natural and not too obvious.”
When Aiken finally met the right surgeon, she was ready to say what she wanted. She told Dr. Ginsburg, “I want my dorsal hump removed, my nostrils made smaller, and my nose straightened.” Dr. Ginsburg used a 4D morphing software to show her what it might look like.
Aiken was happy with what she saw at the consultation. She booked the surgery and paid for it without telling her family. None of her family members have a nose like the one she was born with. She told her family a week before the surgery, not because she was afraid of what they’d think. She just didn’t want any comments that might make her doubt her decision.
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